In this issue:

Peru Congressman Tells Kirchner: Let's Go With LaRouche's New Bretton Woods

Aristide Ousted; What Now for Haiti?

Rumsfeld Pushes Utopian Military Force for Haiti

Venezuela Referendum Failure Brings Threat of Civil War

Chavez Threatens To Cut Off U.S. Oil

Top Synarchist Economists To Descend on Mexico

More Bad Economic News for Brazil's Lula Government

From Volume 3, Issue Number 10 of Electronic Intelligence Weekly, Published Mar. 9, 2004

Ibero-American News Digest

Peru Congressman Tells Kirchner: Let's Go With LaRouche's New Bretton Woods

Congressman Ivan Calderon Castillon, from Piura in the north of Peru, sent a letter of support to Argentine President Nestor Kirchner on Feb. 22, urging him to take up Lyndon LaRouche's call for a creation of a New Bretton Woods. "I have the great honor of addressing Your Excellency ... to express my satisfaction and support for the resistance of your government against the usurious international financial institutions, specifically the IMF, which, with their malicious intention of collecting the last cent possible from victim nations, will end up provoking the inexorable and imminent collapse of the international financial system foreseen by the famous U.S. politician and economist, Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr., currently a Democratic pre-candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America," the letter began.

"This situation does not reflect the bankruptcy of Argentina, but of the international financial system," which is now disintegrating, and is about to explode," Congressman Calderon wrote. If Argentina adopts a clear policy of resistance in this situation, you will "set a precedent for other nations, such as my own, to take initiatives aimed at putting an end to the looting by the international oligarchy.

"Argentina, and the whole continent also, should press, as Mr. Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. has proposed, for the creation of a more just New World Economic Order through a New Bretton Woods agreed upon between perfectly sovereign nations. Through this, by mutual accord, they would decide to put an end to the already finished IMF system and the floating exchange currency system, adopting in its stead a system of fixed exchange rates, and getting underway Hamiltonian National Banks to issue credit for the giant basic infrastructure projects which have been postponed for decades, which could, among their other benefits, obliterate unemployment," the letter stated.

Calderon informed President Kirchner that he was a signer of the Call for an Ad Hoc Committee for a New Bretton Woods, and had submitted bills for the founding of institutions in Peru based on Alexander Hamilton's concept of a National Bank. To achieve all this, he added, requires the physical and political integration of the Ibero-American nations, and the promotion of a system of sovereign and developed republics in the Americas, as was proposed by the United States' John Quincy Adams.

Aristide Ousted; What Now for Haiti?

The U.S. drove Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide out of power on Feb. 29. On Saturday, Feb. 28, the Bush Administration put out the word through several officials that the crisis and violence in Haiti was Aristide's fault, and that he had to leave. The next day, some of the 50 Marines who had been sent to secure the U.S. Embassy escorted Aristide to a private plane, and he flew off, ultimately landing in the Central African Republic.

Chief Justice Boniface Alexandre was sworn in as interim President of Haiti on Feb. 29, and the U.S. State Department began hurriedly setting up a new government for Haiti. Ignoring calls for an investigation of Aristide's ouster coming from the Caribbean Community, the State Department formed a tripartite commission—consisting of Aristide representative Leslie Voltaire, former opposition senator Paul Denis, and the U.N. Development Program Coordinator in Haiti, Adama Guindo—whose job assignment is to set up a "Council of Elders," made up of some dozen or so "eminent Haitians," which would, in turn, have responsibility for arranging Presidential and parliamentary elections, and regrouping the police forces.

Administration officials have said nothing about providing that which Haiti needs most: economic reconstruction. A useful proposal was made, however, by retired State Department official Lawrence Pezzullo, during a forum sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies on March 3. Pezzullo, who was involved in Haiti matters during the U.S. intervention into Haiti during the 1993-1994 period, reported that the U.S. had a plan in 1994, to transform Haiti's military into an Engineering Corps. Instead, the military was disbanded. Pezzullo suggested that that plan could be dusted off and reconstituted, today, as a way of rebuilding the country's infrastructure and pumping money back into the economy. "The country could use an engineering focussed military," he said.

Rumsfeld Pushes Utopian Military Force for Haiti

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld jumped on the Haiti crisis as a pretext to champion, once again, his utopian schemes for global peacekeeping forces to occupy "ungovernable areas." Rumsfeld announced at the March 1 Defense Department briefing that the U.S. would be sending in 1,500-2,000 Marines to secure Haiti, until the international peace-keeping force can be assembled to take over the job. Once the UN force is in action, the U.S. will lower its force in Haiti.

Rumsfeld's main point of emphasis, was that Haiti "demonstrates the need for greater international capacity to conduct global peace operations." The U.S. can help organize, train, develop, and fund multinational "peace-enforcing" forces, which would mean that the U.S. wouldn't have to go in in every case.

Rumsfeld argued in November 2002, at the Defense Ministerial of the Americas, that since terrorists and drug runners were threatening to take over "unoccupied areas of countries," where weak nations no longer maintain control, multilateral military forces were needed to "re-establish sovereignty" [sic]. Haiti was one of the targets cited—as was Colombia, and even the slums of Brazil's largest cities, as EIR exposed at the time.

An anti-neo-con U.S. military source, who follows Ibero-America, emphasized to EIR that Rumsfeld's idea of a hemispheric force was most definitely on the agenda, and those who had said the proposal was dead, are flat wrong. He said that Argentina and Chile are targetted as the first countries to jointly form such a force. As for the deployment of the Marines to Haiti, he noted bitterly: "We are right back where we were in the 1930s."

Venezuela Referendum Failure Brings Threat of Civil War

Venezuela's National Election Council (CNE), in which the government holds a 3-2 majority, officially announced on March 2, that the opposition had failed to collect sufficient signatures on the petition for a referendum on recalling President Hugo Chavez early from his term. CNE head Francisco Carresquero "offered" the opposition another chance on March 18-22, to "repair" or validate some 1.1 million signatures rejected because of alleged irregularities. The proposed "repair" is a farce, as it would require those who signed the petitions to make their way to official polling stations, to see if they were the ones who had to re-do their paper-work, in the hopes of correcting the million-plus which were rejected.

Skirmishes between opposition radicals and the National Guard in Caracas began on Feb. 27, after the National Guard prevented the opposition from marching to the site where the Group of 15 summit was being held. Youths lit bonfires of burning tires and garbage, and set up barricades, across the city's streets and avenues. Firemen report that 220 people were wounded on Feb. 29, alone, in these skirmishes.

The situation is thus moving towards civil war. The declared strategy of the synarchist networks within the opposition directing these actions is not to overthrow Chavez by such tactics, but to create such chaos that the military decides to intervene. The Armed Forces would split under such circumstances.

Chavez Threatens To Cut Off U.S. Oil

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez went on national television on Feb. 29 to blame the U.S. for fomenting the coup plot against him. Calling Bush an "asshole" for believing reports that Chavez had lost his base of support, and insisting that he (Chavez) will last longer in the Presidency than Bush, Chavez declared that "Venezuela is not Haiti, and Chavez is not Aristide," and will not be ousted as was the Haitian dictator.

Chavez threatened that if Bush continues to back the opposition, Venezuela will cut off all oil sales to the U.S. Should the U.S. retaliate by seizing Venezuelan property in the United States—Citgo, for example, is a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state oil company, PDVSA—Chavez promised his regime would retaliate by seizing U.S. property in Venezuela.

Top Synarchist Economists To Descend on Mexico

Top mouthpieces for the dying International Monetary Fund system will be descending on Monterrey, Mexico this month, invited by the Economics Department of the prestigious Monterrey Technological Institute. The International Economics Symposium, sponsored by the Tec (as the institute is known) and the Harbor Intelligence consulting firm, will be held March 18-20 in Monterrey. The list of speakers constitute a "Who's Who" of fascist economics, including:

* The University of Chicago's Gary Becker (1992 Nobel Laureate), who will lecture on prospects for the U.S. economy, and its implications for Mexico. Becker is a member of the fascist Mont Pelerin Society, and, along with his fellow Chicago University Prof. Milton Friedman, advocates drug legalization, elimination of the minimum wage, and privatization of state pensions worldwide. Several of his students went on to become the officials responsible for the 1990s destruction of Argentina.

* James Heckman (2000 Nobel Laureate), a statistician who specializes in developing the theoretical underpinnings of the globalization of labor, will discuss why Mexico must gut its labor force even further, in order to compete with China's cheap labor force.

* Robert Barro, a Mont Pelerinite from Harvard, will give the monetarists' view of "growth," and how to achieve it. He is infamous for the lie that rising unemployment reflects rising productivity.

* Former Pinochet economic adviser Martin Costobal will promote the Chilean "success story"; Barbara Rockefeller, strategist for Rockefeller Treasury Services, and J.P. Morgan's Martin Anidjar will chip in with their "expertise" on wrecking currencies; and Carlos Salinas's murderous Treasury Secretary Pedro Aspe will provide a "Mexican" touch to the discussions.

Publicity has already begun for the event, which would seem to be aimed at shoring up the Mexican front in Wall Street's war against the Ibero-American debtors, as Argentina and Brazil show signs of resisting their own destruction.

More Bad Economic News for Brazil's Lula Government

The Brazilian government's Geographic and Statistical Agency (IBGE) reported Feb. 27 that official unemployment rose from 10.9% in December, to 11.2% in January, in the six major metropolitan regions included in its Monthly Employment Survey. Of the 2.4 million unemployed in these regions, 47.5% live in Sao Paulo—the industrial heartland of the country. According to Sao Paulo's Fundacao Seade and Diesse, unemployment in Sao Paulo hit 19.1% in January, the highest number since 1985. Fundacao Seade projects that that number will rise further in March and April.

Nearly half of unemployed (46.5%) in the six metropolitan regions are under 24 years of age.

The IBGE also reported that family consumption, calculated as part of the Gross National Product (GNP), fell by 3.3% in January 2004, its worst fall since the index began in 1992. The drop in consumption was driven by the high unemployment, and the 12.9% drop in average income in 2003, the IBGE pointed out.

Overall GNP fell by 0.2% in January, also the worst statistic since 1992. GNP, based on money values without any distinction between real and fictitious value, is a rotten gauge of an economy, but the categories of collapse reported by IBGE point to areas of disaster. Construction fell by 8.6%; investment (gross fixed capital) fell by 6.6%. A 5% increase in agriculture, resulting from a big increase in volume and price of farm-product exports, pushed the GNP figure up.

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